Can There Be a Philosophy of Medicine Without a Patient? Should There Be?

The philosophy of medicine has had a long and somewhat problematic history, going back to Hippocrates and Galen. As recently as 30 years ago, bioethicist Arthur Caplan (1992) raised doubts about its existence as a distinct subject matter. These doubts have now been widely allayed. Journal articles, books, companions, and handbooks in the area are quite numerous today. Recently, two single-author introductions to the subject have been published: Alex Broadbent's Philosophy of Medicine (2019) and Jacob Stegenga's Care and Cure: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Medicine (2018a). Both authors write from the perspective of analytic philosophy, with an emphasis on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science as they relate to medicine. One of the issues addressed in both books, medical nihilism, is treated in much more detail in Jacob Stegenga's Medical Nihilism (2018b), and it will be considered briefly in this essay. After a short overview of the subject, this essay will offer a brief summary of each of the two introductions. The essay concludes with observations about the subject matter itself, as well as suggestions for the two authors.